36 Yalta Boulevard tyb-3

by Olen Steinhauer

  He counted three bricks from the bottom, then five bricks from the edge. The brick left gray marks on his fingers, and he had to use a key from his pocket to loosen it, but after a minute he was able to pull it out of the wall.

  The back of the brick had been chiseled away, so that a small space remained between it and the next layer of brick. In that space lay a ring with two keys.

  Number 20 Felberstra?e was covered with a fine layer of soot from the train yard across the street. The tiles in the wall of the foyer had cracked a long time ago, and in those gaps spiders built webs. As he entered the second set of doors, an old man leaving the elevator held it open for him. “ Gru? Gott,” they said to one another.

  It was a small wooden elevator from before the First World War, with the name of a Budapest company on the plaque above the buttons. At the third floor he got out and closed the doors behind himself; the elevator returned to the ground floor on its own.

  The apartment was to the left, and in the dark corridor he leaned close and listened, then used the key.

  During his time as rezident, safe houses had been minimalist affairs-a mattress and a telephone. Nothing else was required. But Josef Lochert, it seemed, had taken it upon himself to decorate. He stood in a comfortable living room not so different from the one where he’d been imprisoned in the suburbs. A sofa covered with a lace blanket sat across from a television, and a china cabinet held trinkets of a life that was still being lived.

  Then he understood.

  “Peter?”

  He looked toward the closed bedroom door.

  “Peter?” the woman’s voice repeated. “Peter, you didn’t forget my chocolate, did you?”

  Brano stepped back toward the front door and opened it.

  “Peter, you better answer me now, you understand?”

  On his way out to the street, he passed a fifteen-year-old with a large bar of chocolate in his hand. Brano smiled at the boy, who looked back curiously.

  Farther north, Brano found a post office with a row of public telephone booths. He approached the woman at the desk and asked if he could place an international call. She accepted his deposit of schillings and the telephone number, and told him to wait in booth number 5.

  He went in and leaned against the glass door, looking out at Viennese talking into their phones, Viennese in line to buy stamps, and sullen Viennese women behind the counters who took envelopes and gave out change.

  The telephone rang.

  “Hello?”

  There was a series of clicks, followed by a long hiss through which he could barely hear a telephone ringing. Then a faint woman’s voice, in his language, said, “Importation Register, First District.”

  “Regina, it’s Brano.”

  “Hello?”

  He raised his voice. “Regina! It’s Brano!”

  “Oh, Brano! Where are you?”

  He sighed, wanting only to listen to Regina Haliniak’s comforting provincial accent. But he said, “I don’t have time to talk. Can I speak to the Comrade Colonel?”

  “Colonel Cerny?”

  “Yes.”

  “One minute.”

  The phone clicked four times, then began ringing again.

  “Brano? You’re on a clean line?”

  “Public telephone, I think it’s clean. The Felberstra?e safe house is no longer safe. Lochert must have sold it for another.”

  “Right,” said Cerny. “Where are you?”

  “Where do you think?”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I’m not being smart, Comrade Colonel. You’ve kept me in the dark. You wanted me in Austria from the beginning, didn’t you?”

  He heard Cerny’s long sigh as static. “Brano, everything has gone to plan. Now hang up and return to your apartment on Web-Gasse and await further instructions.”

  He almost didn’t say the words, but they’d come to him so many times over the last week and a half that by now there was no holding them back. “Have you abandoned me?”

  Another pause. Brano glanced up at the man in the next booth, who was sinking down the wall, crying into his telephone. Cerny said, “Comrade Sev, you will receive your orders when I want you to receive them. Is that understood?”

  “Yes, Comrade Colonel. I just felt-”

  “I don’t care about your feelings, Brano. Not at this moment. I care about the security of socialism. You’ll learn everything you need to learn, but only when you need to learn it. And stay away from our embassy-your presence is not their business. Are you reading the Kurier?”

  “Every day, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Good, Brano.” His voice lowered. “Just tell me that everything’s all right. You’re not hurt?”

  “No.”

  “You’re under observation?”

  “Yes, but I’ve broken away.”

  “Not for long, I hope.”

  “No, Comrade Colonel.”

  “Is there anything else you need?”

  “Need?”

  “Yes.”

  “No,” said Brano. The man in the next booth had hung up the phone but was still in the booth, on the floor, weeping.

  “Okay, Brano. My only order for you now is this-”

  “What?”

  “Be patient.” Then the line went dead.

  The gray Renault pulled alongside him four hours later, as the sun was descending behind the Hofburg Palace. He heard the engine rumbling, then a squeaky window rolling down. Ludwig’s voice: “Come on now, Brano. Take a rest, why don’t you?”

  The car pulled a little in front of him and stopped. Karl stepped out of the back and touched the brim of his hat.

  Ludwig’s head popped out of the passenger window. “Enough. Now get in.”

  Brano climbed into the backseat, and Karl followed him inside.

  They turned right onto the Ringstra?e and rode without speaking for a while, the driver, Karl, and Ludwig preferring to gaze out the windows at their capital.

  “You like Vienna, Brano?” Ludwig didn’t look back when he asked it.

  “It’s a nice city.”

  “It’s a big city with a lot of history, and that’s why we get all these damned tourists. Not that I mind so much-if it wasn’t for tourist money we’d have more war ruins-but sometimes you don’t want to see crowds of Japanese with their little cameras. Know what I mean?”

  “Did you pick me up to talk about tourism, Ludwig?”

  “It’ll get me as far as any other subject.”

  “Try me.”

  Ludwig turned in his seat. “How about hospitality, Brano? You’re a guest in our lovely city. That’s agreed, isn’t it?”

  “Sure.”

  “And I don’t think you could really call us bad hosts, could you? Apartment, money, the freedom to move around-that’s not so bad, is it?”

  “It’s very fine,” said Brano. Despite everything, he found himself admiring Ludwig. His insistent good humor was a rare thing in their business, and sometimes Brano could even imagine liking the inept Austrian. In another life, perhaps. In another war.

  “So you can imagine our frustration when it turns out our guest isn’t being polite. When he in fact tries to send us to Salzburg to make fools of us. Can you imagine our frustration?”

  Somewhere along the way, they had turned around and were driving in the opposite direction. “I can imagine that,” said Brano.

  Karl was looking out the window, smiling.

  “Listen,” said Ludwig. “I’m not going to try to be discreet about this. If you keep this up, we’re going to take you out into the suburbs and fire up our battery again.”

  Brano didn’t answer.

  “But, hey, none of us wants to do that. Right, Karl?”

  Karl nodded at the window.

  “So where were you?”

  “Here and there.”

  “You were gone almost five hours.”

  Brano stared at his hands, which looked very small in this light. “I was at the Espresso Arabia, on
Kohlmarkt, for the first couple hours.”

  “And what were you doing?”

  “I read the newspaper a little, but in general I was enjoying myself. The coffee there is very good.”

  Karl sniffed.

  “And then?” said Ludwig.

  “And then the Espresso Josefstuberl.”

  “On Alser Stra?e.”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Again, just reading?”

  Brano nodded.

  “Anything of interest in the news?”

  “I was learning more about the recent coup in Sierra Leone. And it seems they’re unable to sink the Torrey Canyon oil tanker. The Scottish coast is covered in oil.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Brano. “There have been more protests in America against Johnson’s imperialist war in Vietnam.”

  Ludwig stared at him a moment. “We’ll check on those cafes, you understand? I don’t want to find out you’ve been lying to me.”

  “Anke, the waitress at the Arabia, should remember me. We had a nice discussion.”

  “About what?”

  “About the demise of capitalism.”

  Ludwig looked ahead a moment. “So now can you tell me why?”

  “Why?”

  “Why you’re acting like a spoiled child.”

  Karl was watching the enormous Natural History Museum slide by.

  “I suppose I’m bored.”

  “Bored?”

  Karl turned to look at him.

  “I’ve been here awhile, and I’ve only talked to you. How else am I supposed to feel?”

  Ludwig pursed his lips. “Well, what do you think of that, Karl?”

  Karl shrugged.

  “I told you this before, Brano. You need to meet people. Who doesn’t? Maybe some of your own kind?”

  “My kind?”

  “I don’t mean spies, Brano. I mean your own countrymen.”

  “Maybe.”

  “I’ll tell you what. You go over to Sterngasse. You know where that is?”

  “I can find it on the map.”

  “Good, good. There’s a bar there. The Carp. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

  “I think I’ve heard of it.”

  “Well, you go there, and I assure you you’ll make friends.”

  “Okay,” said Brano.

  “You’ll give it a try?”

  “I will.”

  “Good, good. You make some friends and try to be nice. Is it a deal?”

  “Okay.”

  Ludwig smiled finally. “Because I know that Karl, for one, doesn’t want to have to put those clips on your tits again. Do you, Karl?”

  Karl shrugged and stared out the window.

  31 MARCH 1967, FRIDAY

  Of course he knew the Carp. It was a dingy place in the narrow maze of Vienna’s old fishing district-on Sterngasse, off of Desider Friedmannplatz. He knew what and where it was, though he’d avoided it personally. He’d instead sent his informants into its dark interior to listen to the exiles’ stories of dissatisfaction. Ingrid Petritsch had been one of his better informants; she could maneuver herself among the barstools and flirt the information out of any man, because the exiles would say anything to impress a beautiful woman. They would always explain to her, as if to a child, that their own capital was superior to cold Vienna, though none of them had the courage to return home. Then Ingrid would touch their arms and ask for more.

  But Ingrid, after Bertrand Richter’s death, decided she’d had enough. Cerny had told him this over drinks. She married an English businessman and was now living in London. A goddamned waste, he’d said. She won’t even talk to our local man now.

  In the morning he woke later than usual and did not bother with Eszterhazy Park. Instead, he picked up a Kurier and took it east, to the vast grounds of the Schonbrunn Palace, where, when he wasn’t reading the newspaper’s personals, he gazed at squares of black soil in the enormous gardens being tended by workers in preparation for spring. He mixed with a busload of Italians who shouted at their wives and children, then stopped beside a Grecian sculpture and stared at the crisp blue sky, where a single unformed cloud floated.

  At sunset, he took the tram back into town, to Schwedenplatz by the Danube, then found Sterngasse. It was a short pedestrian street ending in stairs, dirty by Viennese standards but relatively clean to Brano’s eyes. Arched above the door was a wooden carp, silver paint peeling off its ribs.

  There were only a few customers this early, so Brano settled at the bar. The black-haired bartender, a woman of about sixty, smoked beside a wall of palinkas and vodkas, reading a newspaper. She wore large hoop earrings. Behind the bottles, a large mirrored wall allowed him to see his own tired face. In the corner, a wide, glowing jukebox played jazz music.

  “Guten Abend,” she said when she noticed him.

  “Good evening.”

  She smiled. “One of our boys. What can I get you?”

  He rapped the counter with a knuckle. “A beer, I think.”

  Her name was Monika, and she asked how long had he been here, where was he from, and was he going to stay?

  He nodded morosely into his glass, as if he really were one of them.

  “Don’t worry, dear.” She placed a calloused hand on his wrist. “It gets better.”

  He looked at her.

  “You did the right thing,” she said. “You came here. It’s all going to change from this point on.”

  “That’s good news.”

  For the next hour, he drank while Monika asked the occasional question-not probing, just to show she was interested. She seemed to respect his vague answers, because she had been around long enough to know that not all exiles wanted to regale the world with stories of their escapes. When she asked what he did for a living, he paused. He would have liked, at that moment, to speak of one of the elaborate pasts he’d toyed with in the Schonbrunn gardens, but one never knew who would walk through the door and prove him wrong. He didn’t know how long he’d be here, and with each week the chances of being discovered would multiply. He said, “I was a spy.”

  She stopped wiping the glass in her hand. “You’re kidding.”

  “I finally saw the error of my ways.”

  “You’re not pulling my leg?”

  “I wish I was.”

  “What did you do?”

  Spies come in different flavors, and Brano chose the blandest. “I worked in the Metropol, mostly. I spent time with Western businessmen and passed on what I learned.”

  “To Yalta?”

  Brano nodded.

  She put down the glass. “That’s the last thing I’d expect someone to admit. So it must be true.”

  A low-level operative-really, a mere informer-was an easy cover to maintain. No records were kept on such people, and while it was an embarrassing thing to admit, it was better than the complete truth. He smiled at Monika-a shy, embarrassed smile-and said, “It’s not the kind of thing I’d want to advertise, but I should come clean about it sooner rather than later.”

  Then the noise began, in the form of a short blond man who stomped through the doors and shouted in German, “Where the fuck is he, huh? Where the fuck is that useless bastard?”

  Monika raised her voice. “Don’t shout in my bar, Ersek.”

  Ersek’s watery eyes blinked at her a few times. “Just tell me where the fuck Sasha is.”

  “I haven’t seen him all day.”

  “Don’t give me that, Monika. You’re protecting him.”

  “You’re a paranoid man. Have a beer and shut up.”

  Ersek looked around the bar, then grunted and climbed onto a stool. He nodded at Brano and accepted a beer from Monika. She said, “You better stay calm in my place or I’ll kick you out.”

  Ersek smiled, lips wet. “No you won’t.”

  She winked at Brano. “On top of being a pain in the ass, this guy’s Norwegian. Don’t know why I let him in here.”

  “Because I publish half your cl
ientele.” He turned to Brano, his high voice warbling. “You’d think there would be some appreciation, wouldn’t you? A guy from Oslo starts printing up all the half-intelligible mutterings of these barely evolved people, and what does he get for it? He gets a guy like Sasha who doesn’t turn in anything because he’s meditating on his compositions. Tell me, back in your country is ‘meditating’ a euphemism for ‘drinking’?”

  “Sometimes it is,” said Brano.

  “Well, then, I won’t start printing your stuff, either.”

  “Meet Ersek Nanz,” said Monika.

  Ersek stuck out a cold palm, and Brano took it. “Brano Sev.”

  “You’re new?”

  “A couple weeks old.”

  “You’re not a writer, are you?”

  “Not at all.”

  “No,” Monika said under her breath. “He isn’t.”

  “Good.” He took a swill of beer. “People seem to think that being oppressed is the only qualification you need to be a writer.”

  “Sometimes it’s enough to give you a story to tell,” said Monika.

  “But you have to know how to write it.”

  “Then why do you bother?” asked Brano.

  Ersek looked at him. “Huh?”

  “Why waste your time with bad writers?”

  Ersek blinked a few times, and when he spoke he almost whispered. “Because Monika’s right. Someone’s got to get their stories out.”

  “Then stop complaining.”

  “Your second one’s on me,” said Monika.

  Ersek tilted his head, paused, then moved his stool closer as Monika placed another beer on the counter. He’d been a publisher here, he told Brano, for the last five years. “A guy told me it was an easy gold mine. I think he was trying to ruin me.” The idea had been that there was no reputable publisher printing first-person accounts of Eastern Europeans who had fled to the West; the only publishers were receiving funds from the CIA, “making crappy propaganda.” Ersek shrugged. “And it made sense to me. You’ve got a ready market in all these exiles, wanting to hear their own stories. But you know what I didn’t take into account?”

  “What?”

  “Exiles are cheapskates. That’s what they are, down to the last man. And in the end, they don’t give a damn about their fellow exiles.”